Kay > Kay's Quotes

“All memory is a form of fiction. But all fiction is a form of reality.”
― Eric Bogosian, Perforated Heart

“I don’t want to have to be the one who mourns everything when everyone else has clearly forgotten. It’s mortifying. It’s mortifying to be the one who remembers.”
― Ryan O'Connell

“Survival is never more than putting off the moment of death.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Inevitably, with memory comes pain.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its painting, I haven't read its books... I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“I cannot mourn for what I have not known.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“in the face of horror, ancient rituals regained their meaning”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“But I had only known the absurd, and I think that made me profoundly different from them”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they'd known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“even a person raised in captivity learns to want, yearns to see beyond their cage. How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“A Christmas without a book for a present is a disappointment.”
― Margareta Magnusson, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning

“Women of my generation were brought up to not be in the way, to not trouble their surroundings with their presence. That is not the case with men, who take the space they are given for granted. My daughter sometimes says that I am so worried about being a nuisance that my worry itself becomes troublesome. Men don’t think like I do, but they should. They, too, can be in the way.”
― Margareta Magnusson, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Make Your Loved Ones' Lives Easier and Your Own Life More Pleasant

“His snickarbod (Swedish for "toolshed") gradually became what I believe today is called a "man cave." In Swedish we also now sometimes call it mansdagis-- a male kindergarten, which makes me smile and which feels like an entirely appropriate word.”
― Margareta Magnusson, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning

“as a nationality, we tend to be quite blunt, clear-eyed, and unsentimental.”
― Margareta Magnusson, The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly: Life Wisdom from Someone Who Will (Probably) Die Before You

“The world is always ending, and yet it continues to survive. We must always hope for a sustainable future, but hope is not enough.”
― Margareta Magnusson, The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly: Life Wisdom from Someone Who Will (Probably) Die Before You

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Whatever became of the moment
when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words,out we come, bloodied and squalling...with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction
and time is its only measure.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead